Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is the ultimate ‘curate’s egg’. It’s good in parts, sometimes only small parts sadly, but truly colossally awful in others. Everyone I seem to meet these days has some horror story about the NHS, sometimes these stories are about minor annoyances such the NHS’s sometimes ludicrously rude and dismissive staff or the difficulty in getting a GP appointment but others are true tales of horror. In this category you will find stories of incompetent and sometimes malevolent staff, poor decision making by clinicians, ‘tick box’ medicine where approved process takes the place of individual patient centred care and long long waits to be treated or even diagnosed. Sometimes or rather all too often the results of the actions of the NHS and its staff have resulted in patients being permanently harmed or killed. The NHS is now the type of organisation that collects negative judgments on its performance like a fly paper attracts flies. It’s maternity services are a particular scandal with 60% of maternity units being classed as unsafe a few years back by the Care Quality Commission.
Like many poor quality organisations it’s often the the patient who is part of the ordinary general public and who don’t have people to speak up for them that get crap treatment or bad attitudes from staff when it comes to the NHS. As with police forces that have succumbed to minor corruption and let their own officers go unpunished for things like road traffic offences whilst punishing others, many ordinary Britons might believe that NHS staff get superior treatment or are handled more politely than they would be. That may be the case for some instances of NHS staff being treated in NHS facilities, but not all NHS staff get preferential treatment, some are treated just as poorly and carelessly by the NHS as the rest of us are.
A pretty gross example of NHS staff being treated as bad as other Britons are by the NHS comes from the case of Dr Jack Hawkins and his wife Sarah. They lost their baby to stillbirth due to a catalogue of errors and bad practises by staff at the hospital where he and his wife worked, Nottingham University Hospital.
The Times reported on March 2nd 2025:
*Jack Hawkins used to love his job as a doctor at the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. It was where he met his wife, Sarah, a senior physiotherapist. It was where, seven years later, the couple planned she would give birth to their first child, a daughter they would call Harriet. They trusted their colleagues to take care of them.
Their colleagues failed, horrifically. Harriet was stillborn after a catalogue of errors by midwives and doctors in 2016.
After a lengthy legal battle, the couple received £2.8 million in compensation in 2021 and have since been at the forefront of efforts to expose the NHS’s largest maternity scandal. Some 2,500 cases are now being examined.*
This case has revealed a whole host of truly horrific behaviour by NHS staff towards Dr Hawkins and his wife. There was bad advice from midwives and a failure to admit Mrs Hawkins to the hospital at an appropriate time even though Mrs Hawkins suspected that her baby was in distress. The end result of this truckload of poor quality treatment was the Hawkins’s baby perished in the womb. Mrs Hawkins had to endure a traumatic nine hour labour to deliver her dead baby daughter.
But the bad treatment they received from the hospital and the very preventable death of their baby was not the end of the horrors that the Hawkins’s received from the NHS staff and even from those in management positions in the hospital that the Hawkins’s had worked at. The hospital mistreated the body of their daughter and mocked the couple and their plight in staff meetings.
The Times continued:
*It can now be revealed that the hospital allowed her body to decompose so badly in the months after her death that she had to be “triple-bagged” when placed into a coffin for her funeral. Her parents only discovered the horrific failure last summer after forcing the trust to release a cache of internal emails.
A few months later they learnt that staff recorded a 2017 phone call made by Jack, a former medical consultant at the trust, without his consent, and played it at a meeting of senior midwives months later. In this meeting they allegedly “mocked” the grieving father.
Jack said the revelations made him feel sick. “It is an abuse,” he said. “This encapsulates the failures in values, behaviours and quality of care that has caused so much harm and death in Nottingham.”
Sarah added: “They couldn’t even look after Harriet when she was dead. How much more can they put us through? It’s never ending.”
The hospital trust has apologised unreservedly to the couple and launched separate independent inquiries into both incidents.
It’s astonishing to read the whole story of what this hospital put the Hawkins’s through. It’s monstrous. They screwed up their custody of the body of a baby that was dead because of the hospital’s own failures and then mocked the father of the dead baby. Look, I’ve worked in fields where because we’ve seen in front of us the worst of humanity there’s been an element of gallows humour amongst myself and my colleagues but I don’t think I’ve ever worked in an environment when we would mock the death of a baby like these NHS midwives have done. That would have been beyond the pale for us, but not the NHS it seems.
If the hospital can treat NHS staff members like the Hawkins’s in such an appalling, cruel and incompetent way then how much worse does this hospital and its staff treat the ordinary members of the public? The Hawkins’s have at least the connections and ability to go after the hospital because of the way that they have been treated, but there must be thousands upon thousands of other NHS patients who have been treated equally as badly who have not been able to do that and have had no redress for their suffering at the hands of the National Health Service.
Whenever I read stories like this about NHS cruelty and incompetence I find myself approaching a state of despair. Chiefly I despair that any Briton still worships this healthcare equivalent of the failed nationalised industries of the 1970’s where your healthcare is delivered with all the customer care (or rather not) as practised by Post Office Telephones who knew back then that you had zero practical alternative to their failed and failing services and it showed. We are not hating on the NHS nearly enough because it’s an organisation that has come to deserve the public’s hatred.